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Shopping for PPC Management? Watchout for these Pitfalls.

admin — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 17:41:10 +0000

1. Low cost for set up and management-

If you have been shopping for PPC management , you have seen the ads for $199 (or lower) pay per click ad management. They seem like a bargain, especially for businesses that have relatively small ad budgets (say under $2000/month). But are they really a bargain? We have had several customers come to us this year that have tried those services, so I have firsthand experience with the work. From what I have seen, they pretty much throw every keyword they can think of and hope for the best. The result is that the customer wastes the majority of their advertising budget on keywords that do not convert. The bargain quickly disappears with the wasted spend.

It’s like the auto paint jobs for $79….they might look good for a month, but is that really what you want?

Remember, a bad campaign really does cost you money…both in wasted ads and the time and effort lost in dealing with poor leads. Shop carefully.

2. No ownership of your account -

Again, we have had customers come to us with these issues, so this is fairly common. This issue usually appears in two different forms.

The most common way this happens is that the customer agrees to let the PPC Management firm buy the ads and then bill them later. This is bad for the customer for at several reasons:

First, the management firm is most likely marking up the ad costs by at least 20%…any maybe as high as 100%. As a consumer, how will you know? And despite what they might tell you, they can’t buy ads any cheaper than anyone else. Including you. So you are just paying more for clicks than you should.

You don’t actually have a PPC account…the management company does. So you are only getting the benefit of advertising, not marketing knowledge. More on that later.

You are limited to the reports and info they want to show you.

If the company fails, so does your ad campaign. Again, the ad campaign is not your asset, its theirs, you just pay for it. But if they don’t pay their bills, or go out of business you have nothing.

The other situation that we have seen lately is similar, but the outcome is basically the same. In this situation, the customer is uses their credit card to pay the advertising costs, but the PPC management company still treats the account and campaign as theirs. Here the pitfalls are similar, but slightly different:

Again, you don’t own the PPC account, the management company does.

You don’t even get the benefit of using the management companies money for a few days, since the advertising is being charge to your credit card.

You are limited to the reports and info they want to show you.

And again if the management company fails…you have nothing.

Why is this important? A pay per click campaign is your company or personal asset. You are paying a lot of money for these ads and they are providing you with both leads and data. The data you are collecting is valuable and should be yours. By data I mean things like: which keywords work, which ads work best, etc.

These firms don’t want you to control the data because that makes it much tougher for you to leave…you essentially have to start from scratch again. That usually is very expensive, so often you just stay and put up with mediocre (or worse) results.

So a crucial question that you want to ask before signing up with any PPC Management company is this:

if we decide to change firms or run the account ourselves, do I have access to the PPC data for the account and campaigns?

If the answer is no, I would keep shopping.

PPC Predictions for 2010

admin — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 17:39:07 +0000

It seems like everyone in the business is making predictions for 2010, so I thought, why not? Here are a few predictions for 2010 that may affect your business:

1. Pay Per Click on Google AdWords will become more expensive.

Anyone could have made this one, right? Probably, but there are a few things that will nearly guarantee it. First, the economy is most likely going to get better. That will stimulate consumer demand and that will entice businesses to advertise more. For right now, Google is essentially a monopoly, so that means more competition for those coveted first page ad positions. And the corresponding increase in price.

But, just in case the economy is flat, Google is hedging its bets. Google has announced several AdWords features in 2009 and early 2010 that will be available to only a select number of advertisers. The latest that I am aware of is the Contact Form Extensions on AdWords. Again, this is just in Beta now, but the gist of it is that if you meet their ‘select’ criteria and bid high enough to garner the number one ad position on the search results page….they will reward you with an automatic contact extension on your ad and the corresponding benefits. (For more on this, check this link New Contact Form Extensions Beta from Google. A cool feature, yes, but these bells and whistles also have the effect of driving up everyone’s bids as a trickledown effect from the bidding war for the first position.

And competition for Google AdWords in the form of Bing/Yahoo is still months away….probably the earliest is late Fall of 2010. I sure hope the Bing/Yahoo engine brings some real competition to the market place. I think Bing, combined with sites like Facebook, may slow the Google costs down a bit.

2. Facebook will redesign the site to allow for more advertising.

Facebook is one of the real hidden gems in online advertising, but it won’t stay that way for long. Soon the demand for Facebook ads will drive the price up on that site. So, hopefully it won’t be long before they start displaying more ads to gain additional revenue. I used the word hopefully because I am hoping that this is a win-win for both Facebook and advertisers….they get more revenue and the advertisers get more real estate and a small drop in ad costs. If that sounds like a paradox, drop me a line and I will be happy to explain in more detail.

3. Yahoo will launch their equivalent to AdWords Editor.

Sorry…just kidding. I just put that in there for yucks for the professional campaign managers. However that is one of the reasons that I am hoping for the Bing/Yahoo merger to happen. At least Bing is trying to provide an offline editor. Here is a marketing suggestion for Bing/Yahoo….offer a Universal PPC management software package that we could use for Bing and AdWords. It may cause managers to give Bing a look and recommend Bing to their clients.

Well I better quit just a few predictions….Happy New Year everyone and good luck in 2010.

Ad Optimization….and A/B Testing Part 2.

admin — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:42:10 +0000

This is a follow up to our initial article Ad Optimization….and A/B testing Part 1. In that article I said that if you are serious about testing ads, you should not use the default setting that has Google optimize your ads for you.

In this article I would like to show you a real life example that will help illustrate that Google Ad optimization is not a necessarily a good idea.

The figure below shows the ad statistics for one of our clients. (Our thanks to The College of Golf for letting us use this information in our example.)

Figure 1.

Click Thru Rate.

If you look at the two ads that we are going to use for comparison, you will see that one has a CTR (click thru rate) of .65% and the other a CTR of .36%. If those were the only two ads, the Google Optimization feature would automatically start sending all or substantially all of the traffic to the ad that has the .65% CTR.

That’s a good thing right? After all you would get more clicks! Well it’s good for Google, but not necessarily good for your campaign.

Figure 2.

CTR or Conversions?

For a business owner, Figure 2 highlights the more important numbers. Notice the poorer performing ad in terms of CTR did much better in terms of conversions. The ad with the .36% CTR had two conversions at a cost of $13.81/conversion, where as the better performing ad with the .65% CTR had only one conversion at a cost of $52.40.

Frankly, this is an extreme example….but these are the kind of numbers that make a PPC manager lose sleep. And these are real numbers, not something made up to make a point.

If these numbers continued to hold up it would make for a tough decision on whether to keep both ads or not, but I would most likely keep both. Naturally, you will keep the ad with the higher conversion ratio, but retaining the ad with the relatively high CTR will improve your quality score. (If you need a refresher on why CTR is important for quality score, check out this article.

Google Ad Optimization.

So, like I said, the Google Ad optimization algorithm would have picked the first ad and started sending nearly all the traffic to that ad…and it would have made that decision fairly quickly. Maybe in as few as 10 clicks each.

So if you are serious about testing ads, you will want to turn off the optimization option on AdWords and set the ads to rotate evenly. This puts YOU in control and lets you decide when to retire your ads.

Figure 3.

Need more proof? One last surprise!

The primary point that I hope to make in this article is that you need to test ads, but you need to do it with enough information. Most PPC Managers feel that the Google Optimization Algorithm makes decisions much too quickly. And actually many folks that run campaigns will make decisions on ads with too little data.

Here is an eye opener–

Take a look at figure 4 below.

Figure 4.

Identical.

The ads that we have been comparing are identical! Same ad group, same keywords. I discovered this technique by accident (obviously!), but I use it now occasionally as a sort of statistical barometer. Hopefully this underlines the need to collect enough data to make good decisions regarding your ads, keywords, etc. in your Pay Per Click Campaigns. Clearly at this point there is not enough data to make a decision on these ads. Making decisions too early may hurt you in the long run in the quest for finding the best converting ads. Be Careful!

If you think you’re Adwords campaign might be wasting money, contact me for a free Adwords evaluation. I’ll be your second pair of eyes to double check your campaign for these kind of issues. Because when you optimize your Google Adwords campaign, you want someone optimizing it to make money for your business, not Google’s.

Google Slap….Fact or Fiction?

admin — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 16:29:29 +0000

Google Slap….Fact or Fiction?

Google Slap, or more accurately, AdWords Slap is indeed a fact. There are several different definitions of what actually constitutes Google Slap.

Most just use that term for poor quality scores, primarily caused by poor landing pages..but for this article I am using a more focused definition — when your quality scores are affected at Google’s discretion, not by the usual combination of keyword, CTR, and landing page quality.

Maybe we should call this the Google Punch!

I have two real life examples of the ‘Google Punch’ that I have experienced in the last few months here at Site Pro Specialties.

The first is a client that wanted to place AdWords search ads for products such as Tooth Whitener, Diet Supplements, etc.

No matter what they did with their landing page, including adding relevant content, more pages, etc…their quality scores rarely , if ever, exceeded 5.

Why? I contacted my rep at Google and learned, unofficially of course, that there are just some products that are frowned about by the folks at Google. At least the folks that determine what kind of experience that Google Search users should have. They don’t feel that searchers have good experiences with those products, so they put a ceiling on how high the quality scores can go…period.

In highly competitive markets…and what market isn’t competitive these days…..that will pretty much put you out of business. We tried to advocate for them, but in the end we were only marginally successful. They continued to advertise a few products, but gave up on the majority of them.

In the second example, things for our client started out much worse, but worked out in the end.

Our client in this example advertised discount coupons for a computer manufacturer. He had been doing that for a few years and his keywords quality scores ranged from 7 to 10. For those that don’t know, 10 is as high a score as there is. It implies all is well with your keyword, ad, and landing page combination.

One day he noticed that he was no longer getting any clicks. None. Normally he would get over 100/day.

He happened to be working with Vertical Measures on SEO, and they suggested that he give me a call.

I looked at his account and noticed that all of his quality scores were 1….!!! Not 4, not even 3, but 1. Wow he must be really guilty of some really heinous Google crime….the AdWords equivalent of Dr. Evil.

But no, actually all he did was two things….one a simple mistake. The other was simply falling into a group or class of websites.

The mistake he made was something any of us could have done — He wanted to add some negative keywords to his campaign. By accident, he added them to the regular keywords instead. That started a bad chain of events that eventually led to the quality scores effectively putting him out of business.

Although it can’t be verified, here is what I suspect happened:

The keywords he wanted to use as negative keywords , but used as actual keywords triggered a Google audit for whatever reason, either high volume, low quality score, adult content, etc.

During the review process the review board examined his site.

That review board decided that his site fit the model of site that essentially routed traffic somewhere else after one click. Google feels that that type of site typically results in a bad experience and they want to effectively prevent those types of sites from advertising on AdWords search.

The editorial board then manually put a limit (of 1) on the sites quality scores, at least for that campaign. Boom, out of business.

Fortunately, in this particular example things worked out for the customer. I was able to convince my Google AdWords rep to lobby on this clients behalf and had the artificial quality score penalty removed. He is now back operating like normal.

So the Google slap is indeed a fact and it can effectively spell the end of your business or campaign…be careful!!!